Using Remote Authentication

Remote authentication allows you to integrate your organization's authentication system with KBPublisher.

Before you start:

• We assume that you have some experience with PHP and with the system you are connecting to.

Steps to enable Remote Authentication​

• Click on Settings -> Authentication Provider -> Remote 
• Check Enable Remote Authentication checkbox (make sure that $conf['auth_remote'] in the file admin/config.inc.php is set to 1)
• Set required values for constants in file admin/lib/custom/remote_auth.php
• Customize the _remoteDoAuth function in the file admin/lib/custom/remote_auth.php to authenticate the username and password passed to it against your own authentication system
• Rename the function _remoteDoAuth to remoteDoAuth

Quick summary of the process

• End user goes to site
• Remote Authentication checks for valid user credentials
  • If auto-authentication is set, does this automatically
  • If auto-authentication is not set, user logs in first
• KBPublisher authenticates the user .

Customizing the remoteDoAuth function

In your installation there is a folder admin/lib/custom. Within that folder is a file called remote_auth.php. This file contains the _remoteDoAuth function. Customize this function to do authentication against your internal system by using the username and password provided.

Here is a simple example of the function customized to authenticate against a MySQL database:

function remoteDoAuth($username, $password) {

    $user = false;
    $db = &DBUtil::connect($conf);

    $sql = "SELECT
        id AS 'remote_user_id',
        email, username, first_name, last_name
    FROM your_remote_users_table
    WHERE username = '%s' AND password = '%s'";
    $sql = sprintf($sql, $username, $password);
    $result = $db->Execute($sql) or die(DBUtil::error($sql, true, $db));
    
    // if found
    if($result->RecordCount() == 1) {
        $user = $result->FetchRow();
        $user['password'] = $password; // here you should provide not md5ing password
        
        // assign a priv to user (optional)
        // it is fully up to you how to determine who is authenticated and what priv to assign
        // set to off to not rewrite on login
        $user['priv_id'] = 'off';
        
        // assign a role to user (optional)
        // it is fully up to you how to determine who is authenticated and what role to assign
        // set to off to not rewrite on login
        $user['role_id'] = 1;
    }

    return $user;
}

 Also see examples in attached files.

Tracking logins

You can see how your remote authentication works in logs Logs/Logins

For debugging every last login is logged to a file called last_remote_login.log in the KBPublisher cache directory (APP_CACHE_DIR in admin/config.inc.php ).
For example: /home/username/ kb_cache/last_remote_login.log